Need advice for new NAS device.

[RamGuy]

My QNap TS-459 Pro have just gone through RMA and as an lucky Norwegian with our outstanding government laws I can freely pick an replacement from the store I bought it from as long as it's the same price or cheaper, or I could go more expensive and simply pay for the difference in the pricing.

The problem is I have no clue for what I should pick this time around. To be completely honest the TS-459 Pro did never meet my expectations, after all it's a rather expensive device and then I'd expect it to work better than it did.

My network exists of a Netgear SRX5308 router, a WNDR3700 running as 2.4GHz wireless access point and a D-Link DAP-2553 running as 5.0GHz access point and I've got two gigabit switches a Cisco SLM2008 and a Cisco SD1008T.

I had the TS-459 Pro hooked up with 2x CAT7 cabling and tried both balance-rr (round robin) and IEEE 802.3ad but still I often struggled with high latency. At times it could take several minutes just for my machines to connect to the TS-459 Pro in the first place (both over wireless and cable) and considering I ran 4x Western Digital RE4 2TB disks in RAID5 I'd expect it to preform better.

It might be that I expected too much, but have these huge lag-spikes and being incapable of running any kind of 1080P streaming even over cable because of the performance being all over the place is not what I expect for this price tag.


Also an important feature, the TimeMachine Backup solution that supposedly would make the NAS work natively with the TimeMachine features on my MacBook Pro simply wouldn't work at all. My MacBook Pro would just refuse to use the TS-459 Pro for backup. Why I don't really know, I guess the features is simply broken? Sadly this didn't change with firmware updates either.


But after a while the whole thing went loopy, resulting in me RMAing the whole ting. All of a sudden it would refuse to save changes I did to the configuration, it would not restore to factory settings anymore and it wouldn't update to newer firmware so my disappointing experience might have been a result of my TS-459 being faulty from day one. It's impossible for me to say really.


But now I'm here to decide where to go from here. Should I pick up another NAS device? If yes, which and why? Or should I perhaps pop my Western Digital RE4 disks into my Windows7 desktop and run the fileserver from there? That's a very basic solution providing no TimeMachine Backup support or anything but then I could pickup an Mac Mini instead of a new NAS device and turn that into a OS X server taking care of my iTunes Server and TimeMachine Backup stuff.

But I'm not that keen on running my desktop as fileserver simply because I find Windows7 not exceptionally fit for that purpose even though I have a LSI MegaRAID 9260-8i dedicated RAID card.



But what do you think would be the best option for me providing stable and good performance, making me able to utilise it as a fileserver, using it for TimeMachine Backups, iTunes server and actually being able to stream 1080P movies without the NAS device being the bottleneck that messes things up.

Is there any NAS device out there sporting HFS+ or ZFS filesystem support? Or do they all use EXT3 and EXT4?

 

[RamGuy]

When it comes to NAS devices offered from the store I bought my TS-459 Pro from they seem to offer these four alternatives in the same price range:

- Synology DS1511+
- Qnap TS-459 Pro II
- Netgear ReadyNas Pro6 (RNDP6000-200)
- Cisco NSS324 Smart Storage


The Synology and Qnap solution looks almost identical when it comes to hardware, but there are some slight differences in advantage of Qnap like SATA6 controller and external USB3.0 ports. Whether the SATA6 controller is an advantage or not I'm not quite sure as that probably means it's using a Marvell RAID controller which is consider inferior to Intel ICH8 - ICH10 but as these NAS devices run Intel Atom things might be different controller wise?

When it comes to software and features Synology and Qnap seems to offer mostly the same features but they are executed differently and after reading the forums it seems like most people claims that Synology got the better firmware / software compared to Qnap.

EDIT:

I totally overlook the fact that the Synology actually has 5-drive bays instead of just 4-drive bay as the TS-459 Pro making the Synology a obvious choice if the SATA6 controller isn't brining something to the table? Or Qnap is superior software wise which the community don't seem to think.


The Neatgear is a real treat in regards of hardware! First of all it supports nothing less and 6-drives but it also features a 2.66GHz Intel Pentium Dual Core CPU instead of the 1.8GHz Intel Atom Dual Core that both Synology and Qnap uses. I would think this would provide a performance boost? If not directly I guess it would make the whole system less likely to get overloaded and get crippled performance and lag-spikes as an result of that?

What makes me a bit sceptical is the pricing, why is priced in the same range as the TS-459 Pro II and DS1511+ when it seems to spot superior hardware and support 6-drives? There's got to be a catch somewhere?

Sad thing about Netgear is that I have no clue how they are software / firmware wise. Good thing though is that fact that this unit is marketed as a pure business product which normally means good firmware support and development from Netgear. Feature wise it seems to claim about the same as what both Qnap and Synology offers but lots of stuff comes with plugins that you have to add manually afterwards which I fear might be somewhat hit and miss? How the software is executed and feels during use I have no idea but the hardware sure looks tempting.


Last but not least we've got Cisco with the most expensive and least impressive hardware of the bunch with it's Intel Atom 1.6GHz Dual Core and 4-drive bay. Can't help but feel that the pricing of this device is high just because it's Cisco, it might be that the software is really good though.

 

[GregN]

iSCSI

Have you considered iSCSI? For streaming it offers excellent performance, though sharing directly to the NAS becomes limited.

Several NASes now support iSCSI, well in the replacement range.

There is no such thing as a free lunch, I found prices significantly higher due to the Scandinavian consumer protection regs and import fees. Folks I know even consider buying from Germany to get lower prices on their computer gear.

The NASes you mention I think are all reviewed here.